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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1433 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The End of Faith. Going through Kuehnelt-Leddihn's The Menace of the Herd, which I can only describe as an oddity, both judgemental and insightful. Backlog is moving slowly.

Spice & Wolf in the original. It's pretty difficult because the wolf goddess speaks in such an antiquated manner and because the setting is Medieval Fantasy Europe and therefore very far from slice-of-life Japan. I never read it in English so I'm following along as best I can.

And here I never even finished reading the translated version. Did you think about reading the TL in parallel to help with the difficult bits? (To the extent it's a faithful translation anyway...)

Back when I started studying Japanese, I made a rule for myself: if it's in Japanese, you do it in Japanese or you don't do it. I can probably relax that a bit now, 8 years after I started, but I'm wary that if I let myself take the easy way I'll never get back to doing things the hard way. I'll give it a try and let you know.

Working on Feersum Endjinn. It's a pity that it's such a slog, but it really is. Mainly because much of it is written in a quasi-phonetic script. It's just far enough from English that I can't just immediately run my eyes over a sentence - I have to stop and focus on individual words. My kingdom for an English translation...

I keep finding myself going 'wait, is this what functional illiteracy feels like?'.

Love in the Time of Cholera. Fiction, and art in general, is capable of articulating sentiments which do not come around often in real life. The artifice is far from "artificial" in the modern sense. So far (I'm only about 80 pages in), Marquez is saying a lot about love and its counterfeits. I'm eager to continue.

Finished reading Wind and Truth, fifth Stormlight Archive book. It was really not good. Books 3 and 4 had gone downhill so I wasn't expecting too much. Just figured I'd read it since it's the last book of the planned 1st arc. It was rough though. I'm not even sure where to begin criticizing it, every part has issues. It's got some culture war issues, but mostly because Sanderson up to this point has been a prude Mormon author so it feels inconsistent with his previous books. The character arcs go in uninteresting directions that feel like they have low or no stakes and often end pointlessly. Sanderson has never been a great prose writer, but in this book it's bad enough to constantly distract from the story.

It’s a shame, really, because it was refreshing to encounter a fantasy author who delivered straightforward fantasy without forced modern DEI themes. Books 1 and 2 were honestly quite good—classic, heroic epic fantasy done well. However, none of the setups in those books ever pay off. The built up character conflicts just get dropped. The love triangle just fizzles out, and a character's controversial decision is barely addressed. It’s like the characters stop interacting after Book 2. They all seem to have gone on heavy psychiatric medication and started cognitive behavioral therapy, blunting all their emotions and the actions those emotions might inspire. Instead of living and acting through their feelings and getting the self-discovery potential those actions could lead to, they just become distant and introspective, endlessly dissecting their issues in a repetitive, stagnant, psych 101 for dummies style. It's all tell and no show.

I try to imagine myself with Shallan, and I can’t help thinking our individual neuroses would feed off one another in dangerous ways. My sadness fueling her feelings of abandonment when I retreat. Her self-destruction triggering my panic at being unable to help… This quotes a good example. Modern relationship advice, modern language. It might be true that their, "individual neuroses would feed off eachother in dangerous ways." but it's a book, actually exploring that and forcing characters to grow through their interactions is basic storywriting and character development stuff. Characters have conflicts between each other in this book that are resolved without the characters ever meeting.

I kinda wonder if Sanderson just wants to get to his long term over arching cosmere stuff more than he wants to write good books. So everything is getting the short stick and forced into unnatural feeling storylines to keep things on track. No time to write these character interactions, gotta introduce random new cosmere lore! Which is ironic for a series whose moral was supposed to be, "journey before destination."

I thought the book was decent, but a noticeable step down from the previous 4 (which I thought were all excellent). My main gripes were twofold. First, while the series has always had an element of being very heavy handed about mental illness, this one really took it to another level. It felt like everyone's foremost character trait was their mental baggage (to be fair that was always the case for Kaladin but now it's everyone), and as you said it just gets handled in a way that feels very... Reddit, for lack of a better way to put it. Lots of emphasis on therapy and thinking about mental illness in a way that the other books really didn't have. I don't really care for the way he took an interesting aspect of the setting (you need to have some cracks in your soul to get powers) and Flanderized it the way he did in this book.

My second beef was the culture war angle I suspect you allude to, Renarin and Rlain's nascent relationship. It just feels so forced. The series has had gay people in it and that was fine (if a bit anachronistic for the tone of the setting, but so are a lot of things I suppose), but this was just over the top for me. For one thing it feels like it was a DEI box-checking exercise first and foremost - "hey let's not only have a gay romance, but a gay INTERSPECIES romance with an autistic dude!". So this feels very forced in a way that other, similar situations just didn't. But that isn't even close to the biggest problem with it. No, the biggest problem is Shallan playing cheerleader the whole time, culminating in letting out excited squee noises like she's some fucking Tumblr fangirl. It is absolutely insufferable and I very much doubt if I will ever read those chapters again because of it. I feel like Sanderson is spending too much time listening to the Reddit/etc section of his fan base (who I have no doubt eat this stuff up), to the point that I got the sense that Shallan was meant to be an audience stand-in when she got all excited. But I can't stand it. I'm willing to give him a break on this one just because like I said, his other books have been excellent. But if he keeps this shit up I'm probably going to stop reading. It was that annoying to read.

Those two things aside I thought the book was fine. I didn't hate it. But it was a definite step down for me, the first real blemish on his record since Elantris (which was his first book so i don't expect it to be as good as the rest). I can imagine that I would be much more upset if, like you, I hadn't really thought the last two books were that good either. But for me this is just an outlier in quality, one I hope remains an outlier and that he goes back to his usual standard. We'll see.

Yeah that was not subtle. I couldn't stop rolling my eyes at this book in general, and the modern immersion breaking references, but there were a lot of Renarin things that were especially bad. They visit his childhood room and his hobbies were reading and model kit building (omg he's just like redditors!) or at one point he is nervous and if I'm remembering correctly he is basically described as both fidgeting, while spinning a sphere in his hands to distract himself. Fidgeting and spinning...

I think what bugged me the most was something that bugged me about a lot of the other plotlines too, namely the timing It's 10 days before what could be the apocalypse and confronting an evil god and everyone is more worried if their uwu crush notices them, or for Kaladin if they're self-actualizing. Is being a soldier really the right job for Kaladin? Or Sigzil? Maybe they'd be better off as therapists or carpenters. It just felt so first-world problems. You need to meet all those lower needs like not being dead on Maslow's hierarchy first.

Also the entire recreance just turned out to be Humans being bigots and if they had just learned to mate with and love the crab people instead of being slavers everything bad could've been averted Just a really lazy and typical modern plotline that's been done to death. Avatar etc. I like Sanderson's worldbuilidng but the rest I've come to dislike. Too many safe and easy plotlines, (Even evil god turns out to have faked destroying his city, and of course Dalinar doesn't actually have to take a stance on the trolley problem, it's just dodged to be fixed at some later date) so feels written by HR for approval by the overly online crowd. I kinda wish he'd keep worldbuilding but let other authors write some of the stories, since he seems to be getting overwhelmed with all the cosmere stuff with the expanding scope. Need to at least pick up a much more critical editor and get rid of the overly online fandom sourced beta readers.

Still on Montaillou, from which I learned that there's a town in Spain called Stuck my dick in a bottle of Pepsi.

Alright, tell the tale. I had intended to read Montaillou, but now I'm no longer sure it is what I expected.

I'm kidding, it's a town called Peñiscola (so I'm sure it's pronounced more like "pen-YIS-co-LA" or whatever), but I did a bit of a double-take when I saw it.

Just finished Dawn Razed and have moved on to This Inevitable Ruin: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 7.

I'm still plodding through Blood Meridian. The prose is so goddamn beautiful, but I can't engage with it unless I'm close to 100%. Was listening to The Dead South and they gave me the urge to pick it up again.

Still reading Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles. Nothing else new or particularly interesting so far.

Also reading Matthew Bracken's new book, Doomsday Reef as more light entertainment. It's pretty heavily red-team coded fiction. As is typical with his books, I enjoy the plot generally, though I find the specific collapse / apocalypse scenarios described to be highly implausible.

I recently finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, which I had read as a child but was unaware (until recently) that my family had an abridged version. It was interesting reading the unabridged, but man... I think that book is better abridged. Verne goes on for pages and pages just listing species of fish that his characters encounter. I would guess that fully 1/4 of the book is just "we saw (insert long list of fish here)". Still a classic, I still enjoyed it well enough, but I doubt I ever read this edition again.

After that I read the first proper Witcher novel, Blood of Elves. I was concerned that I wouldn't enjoy it as much as the short story collections which preceded it, but I did really enjoy it. Still remains to be seen how well Sapkowski develops a story that stretches over several books, but this was good enough that I'm looking forward to reading more.

Next up is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, which I said I was going to read a while back but got sidetracked by other things. This time for real though, as I don't have other books to distract me from it any more.

Mainly because of a brief discussion of this series here a while ago, I'm nearing the end of book 4 of The Stormlight Archive. I'm not fond of fantasy, I'm not fond of Sanderson's writing, but I wanted something of reliable quality rather than risk disappointment like with several previous books. So, I was surprised by how engrossed I was by books 1 and 2. Since then, well, not so much.

One particular thing about Rhythm of War drives me mad, because half of the plot hinges on a specific event. There's this hardass commander* that is noted a dozen times per book to be a stickler for military codes, how the troops under him are visibly more disciplined than others, etc. And yet, when the bad guys launch a surprise attack on the single most important stronghold, they kill patrols and sentries on the ground level and then ascend for hours to the tower itself, without anybody noticing. How could his people have missed the outer perimeter going dark for hours? They have instant communications!

*Don't ask me to spell his name, I'm consuming the series as audiobooks. The irony is not lost on me, this is the only time I say: they should have centered female voices.

Dalinar is his name. Kaladin, Shallan, Renarin, Adolin, Jasnah, Szeth. Kholin. What else?

As for the series itself: Sanderson has yet to write a better book than The Way of Kings. Words of Radiance is really part 2 of the same stellar first book, but books 3/4/5 are not the same.

If there's another book of his that's quite good, it's Shadows of Self, one of his less-known works. I always loved that one.

Shadows of Self was the best of the Wax&Wayne series for me, before the Southerners arrive and Sanderson really starts modernising the setting. The villain is great and their goal is something that at least part of you can root for.

I really liked book 3 of the Way of Kings, though. Dalinar's backstory makes total sense, even though it's not what I expected at all, and it explains so much about how people react to him in-universe.

Starting on the silmarilion. Reads a bit like elvish scriptures more than a novel per se.

I've never been able to get into it for exactly that reason.

That's pretty much right. Were you expecting a novel?

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